Sunday, April 16, 2006

Now if you're new to this blog, you're probably wondering "Hey, if she's an atheist, what's she doing celebrating the festival of the goddess Astarte??"

But, as I explained in this earlier blog entry Tradition!, I like to participate in the traditions of my culture, even if some people associate those traditions with various deities I don't believe in.

We practice an interesting mix of French and American customs in our house. For example, it seems that here in France, people don't really dye boiled eggs like they do in the US. I figured out pretty quickly that this is probably because the eggs sold here are always brown, and the brown ones don't take the dye as well.

But I'm not one to let something as trivial as that stop me!!! I discovered that the trick is that instead of making one cup of dye per color and dipping multiple eggs in each one, you make an individual dye cup for each egg, and let it sit in the dye for a long time:

We're learning through experimentation every year around here. This year I was cleverly thinking "If leaving the eggs in the dye for a half-hour produced bright colors, then leaving them in for an hour-and-a-half will make them even brighter!!!"

Experimentation proved this theory wrong. It would appear that if you wait too long, the vinegar actually starts to degrade the shells, so I got brighter colors last year just leaving them in for fifteen minutes to a half-hour. Still, they weren't a total failure:

Since Noell was talking about telling kids about the Easter Bunny over on her blog, I was curious as to where my Nicolas thought the eggs came from. He said they came from flying bells. (There's no Easter Bunny in France -- the eggs are dropped by flying bells.) I then asked him if Mommy colored the eggs. He said yes and pointed to the ones Mommy colored.

Then when I asked where the candy came from, he said it came from "up!" I asked if it didn't perhaps come from Champion (he was with me when I bought it), but he didn't seem to understand the question.

We had our Easter egg hunt after church, and we really had to do it quickly because it was so hot that the chocolate was starting to melt, and I was afraid that hard-boiled eggs wouldn't last very long in the heat.